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Writers jailed in 2002 for political satire

Newsday.com

by James RupertOctober 31, 2005

After three years at Guantanamo, Afghan writers found to be no threat to United States

Peshawar, Pakistan. Badr Zaman Badr and his brother Abdurrahim Muslim Dost relish writing a
good joke that jabs a corrupt politician or distills the sufferings of
fellow Afghans. Badr admires the political satires in "The Canterbury
Tales" and "Gulliver's Travels," and Dost wrote some wicked lampoons in
the 1990s, accusing Afghan mullahs of growing rich while preaching and
organizing jihad. So in 2002, when the U.S. military shackled the
writers and flew them to Guantanamo among prisoners whom Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared "the worst of the worst" violent
terrorists, the brothers found life imitating farce.

For months, grim interrogators grilled them over a satirical
article Dost had written in 1998, when the Clinton administration
offered a $5-million reward for Osama bin Laden. Dost responded that
Afghans put up 5 million Afghanis -- equivalent to $113 -- for the
arrest of President Bill Clinton.

"It was a lampoon ... of the poor Afghan economy" under the Taliban,
Badr recalled. The article carefully instructed Afghans how to identify
Clinton if they stumbled upon him. "It said he was clean-shaven, had
light-colored eyes and he had been seen involved in a scandal with
Monica Lewinsky," Badr said.

The interrogators, some flown down from Washington, didn't get the
joke, he said. "Again and again, they were asking questions about this
article. We had to explain that this was a satire." He paused. "It was
really pathetic."

It took the brothers three years to convince the Americans that they
posed no threat to Clinton or the United States, and to get released --
a struggle that underscores the enormous odds weighing against innocent
foreign Muslims caught in America's military prisons.

In recent months, scores of Afghans interviewed by Newsday -- including
a dozen former U.S. prisoners, plus human rights officials and senior
Afghan security officials -- said the United States is detaining enough
innocent Afghans in its war against the Taliban and al-Qaida that it is
seriously undermining popular support for its presence in Afghanistan.

As Badr and Dost fought for their freedom, they had enormous advantages over Guantanamo's 500-plus other captives.

The brothers are university-educated, and Badr, who holds a master's
degree in English literature, was one of few prisoners able to speak
fluently to the interrogators in their own language. And since both men
are writers, much of their lives and political ideas are on public
record here in books and articles they have published.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, declared this summer that
"there was no mistake" in the brothers' detention because it "was
directly related to their combat activities [or support] as determined
by an appropriate Department of Defense official." U.S. officials
declined to discuss the case, so no full picture is available of why it
took so long for the pair to be cleared.

The Pentagon's prison network overseas is assigned to help prevent
attacks on the United States like those of Sept. 11, 2001, so "you
cannot equate it to a justice system," said Army Col. Samuel Rob, who
was serving this summer as the chief lawyer for U.S. forces in
Afghanistan. Still, he added, innocent victims of the system are "a
small percentage, I'd say."

The military is slow to clear innocent prisoners, largely because of
its fear of letting even one real terrorist get away, said Rob.

"What if this is a truly bad individual, the next World Trade Center
bomber, and you let him go? What do you say to the families?" asked Rob.

Rob and the Defense Department say the prison system performs
satisfactorily in freeing innocents and letting military investigators
focus on prisoners who really are part of terrorist networks. Badr and
others -- including some former military intelligence soldiers who
served in Guantanamo and Afghanistan -- emphatically disagree.

The United States for years called Badr and his brother "enemy
combatants," but the men say they never saw a battlefield. And for an
America that seeks a democratized Afghanistan, they seem, potentially,
allies. Americans "have freedom to criticize your government, and this
is very good," said Badr. Also, "we know that America's laws say a
person is innocent until he is proven to be guilty," although "for us
it is the reverse."

Badr and Dost are Pashtuns, members of the ethnic group that spawned
the Taliban. But the family library where they receive their guests is
crammed with poetry, histories and religious treatises --
mind-broadening stuff that the Taliban were more inclined to burn than
read. For years, the brothers' library has served as a salon for
Pashtun intellectuals and activists of many hues, including some who
also have been arrested in the U.S.-funded dragnet for suspected
Islamic militants.

Like millions of Afghans, they fled to Pakistan during the Soviet
occupation of their country in the 1980s and joined one of the many
anti-Soviet factions that got quiet support from Pakistan's military
intelligence service. Their small group was called Jamiat-i-Dawatul
Quran wa Sunna, and Dost became editor of its magazine. Even then, "we
were not fighters," said Badr. "We took part in the war only as
writers."

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the men split with Jamiat, partly
over its promotion of the extremist Wahhabi sect of Islam. Dost wrote
lampoons against the group's leader, a cleric named Sami Ullah,
portraying him as a corrupt pawn of its sponsor, Pakistan, working
against Afghan interests.

In November 2001, as U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan, the mullah's
brother, Roh Ullah, "called us and said if we didn't stop criticizing
the party he would have us put in jail," said Badr. Ten days later, men
from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate hauled the
brothers off to grimy cells.

Another Ullah brother, Hayat Ullah, insisted in an interview that their
family had not instigated the arrests. Dost is a political rival, but
"a very simple man," Hayat Ullah said. "We have many powerful rivals.
If I were going to get ISI to pick up an enemy, why would I choose an
ordinary person like him?"

Pakistan-U.S. transfer

But two Pakistani analysts with sources in ISI said the Ullah family
has been accused in several cases of using its links to the agency to
have rivals arrested. And Roh Ullah himself is now imprisoned at
Guantanamo.

In the midnight chill of Feb. 9, 2002, ISI officers led Badr and Dost,
blindfolded and handcuffed, onto the tarmac of Peshawar International
Airport. When they heard airplanes, "we knew they were handing us to
the Americans," Badr said.

Beneath the blindfold, he stole glimpses of smiling Pakistani officers,
grim U.S. soldiers and a cargo plane. "It was a big festival
atmosphere, as though the Pakistanis were handing over Osama bin Laden
to the United States," Badr said.

Shouting and shoving, American troops forced the brothers to the
asphalt and bound their hands behind them with plastic ties. "They
chained our feet," Badr said. "Dogs were barking at us. They pulled a
sack down over my head. It was very difficult to breathe ... and I saw
the flash of cameras. They were taking pictures of us."

Flown to U.S. prisons at Bagram and Kandahar air bases in Afghanistan,
the brothers eventually learned from their interrogators that the ISI
had denounced them to the U.S. as dangerous supporters of the Taliban
and al-Qaida who had threatened President Clinton.

In the three-plus years that the brothers spent in U.S. prisons abroad, violent abuse and torture were widely reported.

Eight of 12 men interviewed after their release in recent months from
U.S. prisons in Afghanistan told Newsday they had been beaten or had
seen or heard other prisoners being beaten.

The brothers escaped the worst abuse, partly because of Badr's fluent
English. At times, prisoners "who didn't speak English got kicked by
the MPs because they didn't understand what the soldiers wanted," he
said. And both men said that while many prisoners clammed up under
questioning, they were talkative and able to demonstrate cooperation.

"Fortunately, we were not tortured," Badr said, "but we heard torture."
At Bagram, "We heard guards shouting at people to make them stand up
all night without sleeping." At Kandahar, prisoners caught talking in
their cells "were punished by being forced to kneel on the ground with
their hands on their head and not moving for three or four hours in hot
weather.

Some became unconscious," he said. The U.S. military last year
investigated abuse at its prisons in Afghanistan but the Pentagon
ordered the report suppressed.

Routine interrogations

Badr and Dost were humiliated routinely. When being moved between
prisons or in groups, they often were thrown to the ground, like that
night at Peshawar airport. "They put our faces in the dust," Badr said.

Like virtually all ex-prisoners interviewed, he said he felt
deliberately shamed by soldiers when they photographed him naked or
gave him regular rectal exams.

The brothers were flown to Guantanamo in May 2002 as soon as Camp
Delta, the permanent prison there, was opened. For more than two years,
they sat in separate cells, waiting days between interrogation sessions
to explain and re-explain their lives and writings.

In his 35 months in U.S. captivity, Badr said, he had about 150
interrogation sessions with 25 different lead interrogators from
several U.S. agencies. "And that satire was the biggest cause of their
suspicion," he said.

When one team of interrogators "began to accept that this was satire,"
the whole process would begin anew with interrogators from another
agency. In all, Badr said he was told that four U.S. agencies --
including the CIA, FBI and Defense Department -- would have to give
their assent before the men could be released. And their names would be
circulated to 40 other countries to ensure they were not wanted
anywhere else.

The Americans' investigations seemed to take forever to confirm even
where they had lived and studied. "I would tell him [the interrogator]
something simple and ... two or two-and-a-half months later, he would
come back and say, 'We checked, and you were right about that,'" Badr
said.

Another problem was that "Many of the interpreters were not good," said
Badr. He recalled an elderly man, arrested by U.S. forces for shooting
his rifle at a helicopter, who explained that he had been trapping
hawks and fired in anger at one that flew away. But the interpreter
mistook the Persian word "booz" (hawk) for "baz" (goat). "The
interrogator became very angry," Badr said. "He thought the old man was
making a fool of him by claiming to be shooting at goats flying in the
air."

Angered by ordeal

Rob conceded that "obviously, we could use more translators," but said
the pace at which prisoners are processed -- and innocents released --
is adequate.

That idea angers Badr. "They detained us for three and a half years,"
he said. "Then they said to us, 'all right, you're innocent, so go
away.'"

Of that anger, Rob said, "that's understandable. Especially if he's the
breadwinner for his family and there's no one ... " The sentence hung
uncompleted.

The brothers' anger is deepened by the abusiveness of many U.S.
soldiers, whom Badr compared to "Yahoos," the thuggish characters of
Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." And they are upset that U.S.
officials confiscated all of their prison writings.

Still, Badr sounds neither bitter nor an enemy of America. "I am
curious to meet ordinary Americans," he said. "I appreciated my
interrogators in Guantanamo. ... Many of them were misguided, for
example about my religion. ... But I can say that they were civilized
people."